Guest: The Toronto Star’s Richard Warnica, reporting from Washington, DC In this episode, This Matters returns from hiatus with a special episode on the U.S. Election. Knowing all that they know about Donald Trump — after the court convictions and the insurrection and the threats and open bigotry, and after a campaign in which he sometimes seemed increasingly undisciplined — Americans sent him back to the Oval Office. And they voted for him by higher margins than in 2016. The day after the...

Guest: The Toronto Star’s Richard Warnica, reporting from the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin Less than a week after a would-be assassin wounded former U.S. President Donald Trump, he accepted his party’s nomination to run for president again on a stage in Wisconsin. In between, he selected a vice-presidential candidate, created a new political fashion trend for ear bandages, and watched as Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt off and invoked Trumpamania. The Republican Party,...

Guest: Alex Boyd, Toronto Star reporter  The investigations continue into what drove 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks to open fire last weekend, at former president Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, before being shot dead by a Secret Service sniper. But moments after the shooting, social media platforms were flooded with conspiracy theories with both right and left-wing voices amplifying mis and disinformation. From claims that the blood on Trump's ear was fake and from a...

Guest: Allan Woods, Toronto Star global and national affairs reporter On the weekend, a 20-year-old gunman opened fire at a Donald Trump campaign rally, apparently injuring the former president, killing a bystander, and injuring two others. Toronto Star reporter Allan Woods wrote this week about the history of political violence and assassinations in the U.S., and about what that history might teach about how to step back from the brink of civil war. He also discusses the political fallout...

Bruce Arthur and Dave Feschuk take a final tour through Toronto's recent sports history. They touch on the bean-counting days of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and Rogers to the more ambitious days of Bell and Rogers, with Larry Tanenbaum in between. They muse on the bad old days of the Leafs, Raptors and Jays to the current era of Brendan Shanahan, Masai Ujiri, and Mark Shapiro in Toronto sports. They consider the end of Alex Anthopoulos, the Raptors title (and the subsequent idea that...

Guest: Legendary sports broadcaster Dave Hodge, formerly of TSN and Hockey Night in Canada Hosts: Bruce Arthur and Dave Feschuk When Brendan Shanahan took over the helm of the Maple Leafs in 2014, he vowed not to repeat the sins of various predecessors accused of rushing the team-building process. Shanahan insisted he would exercise patience. But after eight post-season runs in which the Maple Leafs have only once advanced beyond the opening round, Shanahan’s refusal to give up on the...

Guest: Toronto Star basketball writer Doug Smith Hosts: Bruce Arthur and Dave Feschuk   Five years ago, Masai Ujiri was among the most coveted executives in all of pro sports, his masterstroke trade for Kawhi Leonard landing the Raptors their first NBA title. In the five years since, the franchise has won one playoff series while languishing through less-than-inspiring moments that Ujiri himself has characterized as difficult to watch. In this episode, Arthur, Feschuk and Smith discuss...

Guest: Former Toronto Star baseball columnist and Blue Jays PR director Richard Griffin Hosts: Bruce Arthur and Dave Feschuk   Mark Shapiro could have been the perfect president of the Toronto Blue Jays. In the eight years since he took over for Paul Beeston, Shapiro has successfully convinced Blue Jays ownership to spend big money on the team, not to mention hundreds of millions in renovations to Rogers Centre and the club’s Florida training base. Beyond those improvements, though, the...

Guest: Deborah Dundas, opinion section editor at the Toronto Star  A chilling revelation has surfaced almost a month after the death of Canada's literary giant, Alice Munro. Andrea Skinner — who is Munro’s daughter — has revealed in the Toronto Star that her stepfather Gerald Fremlin sexually abused her when she was nine years old. She was only able to tell her mother in a letter when she was in her 20s. Her mother chose to remain with Fremlin, even after discovering the abuse. For nearly...

Guest: Olivia Chow, mayor of Toronto One year ago, Olivia Chow was elected mayor of Toronto in a victory that signalled optimism in a city where that seemed in short supply. As we approach the annual Pride parade and the Canada Day long weekend (and after a marathon city council meeting), Chow reflects on what she’s proudest of and what has been most challenging so far. She also talks about the difficulty of moving people faster, why she thinks she’s been misunderstood on whether workers...

Guest: Cait Alexander, artist and social activist In 2022, 184 women were killed violently in Canada. That’s one woman killed every 48 hours. More than four million women, 30 per cent of all women aged 15 and older, report that they have experienced sexual assault. It’s costing Canada almost $8 billion to deal with the aftermath of spousal violence alone. Is a country that in the past was considered a global champion of human rights, failing to effectively protect women at home? In 2022, the...

Guest: Andrea Gunraj, vice president public engagement, Canadian Women’s Foundation In 2022, 184 women were killed violently in Canada. That’s one woman killed every 48 hours. More than four million women, 30 per cent of all women aged 15 and older, report that they have experienced sexual assault. It’s costing Canada almost $8 billion to deal with the aftermath of spousal violence alone. Is a country that in the past was considered a global champion of human rights, failing to effectively...

Guest: Mary Simon, governor general of Canada  Gov. Gen. Mary Simon was appointed to her role in 2021, and made history as the first Indigenous person to hold that office. She used her social media to share updates about her work until last year, when the online hate came for her. Her team was forced to close her social media account’s comment section because the incoming hate became vile, racist and relentless. Yet in a powerful move, Gov. Gen. Simon took back her story and publicly shared...

Guests: John Degen, novelist, and Peter Gorman, Deputy People's Warden at St. Anne's On June 9, a catastrophic four-alarm fire destroyed St. Anne's Anglican Church in Toronto's Little Portugal neighbourhood. The flames turned valuable paintings that were embedded into the very structure to ashes, including the only know religious artwork made by Canada’s famed Group of Seven. With the loss of St. Anne's, Canada has lost a historic site, but the community that built its life around the church...

Guest: Satirical conspiracy theory leader Peter McIndoe It all started when Peter McIndoe, a self-described “obnoxious teenager,” went to a women’s march and scrawled the most random phrase he could think of on a sign: “Birds Aren’t Real.” When asked by people around him what he meant, he improvised a whole back story, someone posted a video of him online, and a fake movement was born. He spent a couple of years zigzagging across the U.S. in his van, playing the part of a conspiracy leader,...

Guest: Ben Spurr, city hall bureau chief  Can you imagine Toronto without its public transit lifeline? A TTC strike might be looming for the first time in almost 16 years as thousands of transit workers might soon walk off the job and on to the picket line this Friday. Despite months of negotiations on job security, wages and benefits, the TTC management and the union representing about 12,000 workers seems to be in a deadlock. City hall bureau chief Ben Spurr explains the stakes on both...

Guest: David Miller, former mayor of Toronto Former Toronto Mayor David Miller was always an advocate for the environment. But in the nearly 14 years since he left office he’s become one of the world’s great networkers for climate solutions, bringing together mayors from 96 cities to share policy ideas, programs and practices. In this episode of “This Matters,” Miller discusses why municipal governments are best positioned to rapidly deploy climate solutions and the ways he’s seen mayors...

Guest: Shawn Micallef, contributing columnist and author of “Stroll: Pyschogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto” In 2010, journalist Shawn Micallef first published his book of observations, suggestions and civic history gleaned from years of wandering around the city and paying close attention to what he saw. In the 14-years since, as Micallef became a freelance columnist for The Star, the book has been a perennial local favourite, running through several press runs. This week, a new, updated...

Guests: Journalists Samira Mohyeddin and Christopher Curtis Student protests that first erupted across the United States have now spread northward, igniting across Canada, including campuses at University of Toronto, McGill University, University of British Columbia and University of Alberta among others. The students say they want to end a war that’s claimed more than 34,000 Palestinian lives, according to local officials, destroyed or damaged every university in Gaza and displaced hundreds...

Guest: Toronto PWHL season ticket holder and superfan Connie Hamers At the inaugural game of Toronto’s professional women’s hockey team, Connie Hamers had front-row seats, and immediately took a liking to the play of rookie Emma Maltais. By game two, she’d labelled her section “Emma Nation” and began bringing team swag she made (or had made) herself — signs, team roster reference lists, mini-sticks, hockey cards — to games to distribute freely to others sitting around her. She travelled with...

Guests: Jasmine Eastmond, Tristan Kim and Kristin Rushowy  The Ontario government has announced a crackdown on cellphones and vaping in schools, new regulations that are being seen as some of the toughest in Canada. According to Education Minister Stephen Lecce, the new government policy for cellphones, with some exceptions, is out of sight, out of mind. With this new move to ban cellphone use in classrooms, Ontario has joined a global movement with similar restrictions being imposed in the...

Guest: Betsy Powell, courts reporter After the death of police Const. Jeffrey Northrup, the trial of Umar Zameer for first degree murder galvanized attention (and political rage) in the Toronto area. Now that he’s been found not guilty, people are left with questions about a prosecution that always seemed to be based on flimsy grounds. Reporter Betsy Powell covered the case for the Star from its beginnings to its conclusion, and spoke one-on-one with Zameer following the verdict. Now on...

Guest: Sophie Grégoire Trudeau Even before Sophie Grégoire Trudeau married Prime Minister Justin Trudeau she was an advocate for mental health, openly sharing her personal struggles with eating disorders. She discusses her new book. She shares those struggles afresh, along with tales of her parents, her schooling, her relationships, in her new book, “Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other,” which she describes as a personal journey toward empowerment.

  We asked three published, award-winning Toronto poets to weigh in on Swift’s literary merit at a listening party on the album’s release day. The assignment: dissect three new songs as though Swift were a writer workshopping new pieces. Guests: Sanna Wani, a poet and poetry editor whose latest book, “My Grief The Sun,” was released in 2022; Jody Chan’s most recent volume of poems, “impact statement,” came out earlier this year and they are an artist-in-residence at the University of...